Numbers and Politics

This strikes me as a bit of a knee-jerk feminist critique of Anna Faris's new movie, What's Your Number?  (Full disclosure:  Anna is the sister of a good friend of mine from grad school, and very simpatico in person--but I'm not sure I've seen any of her movies since Lost in Translation.)

What’s Your Number?, the new Anna Faris comedy about a 30-something woman named Ally Darling who is fixated on the fact that she’s slept with 20 men, is a critical and box office failure, with reviewers slamming the film’s retrograde sexual mores. For those of you who missed this flop, here’s a quick synopsis:  Ally, who has just lost her job and hit bottom, becomes obsessed with the significance of a woman’s “number”—the number of men she has had sex with—after reading in a women’s magazine that women who have sex with more than 20 guys are much less likely to get married. As Slate movie critic Dana Stevens notes, the film doesn’t really argue with the notion that Ally is a capital-S slut. As Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum put it, “Whore is the kind of descriptor the creators of What's Your Number? think is hilarious for a woman to apply to herself, one whose only ‘scandal' involves a head count of her sex partners. And by the way, who in this day and age is counting?”

I am, for what it's worth (not that I'd give you the number).  But back to the review:  there's nothing wrong--and a lot right--with feminist critiques.  But can't a film find humor in the 'retrograde sexual mores' at play in a story about a woman who obsesses about her head count (a misleading phrase, surely...) and considers herself a slut without endorsing these mores?  This seems like textbook 'implied author' stuff--is there a literary critic in the house?--but presumably a film mocking racism would also catch heat in this narrow-minded political climate.  These days, you practically have to put a written disavowal up on the screen if your work deviates at all from the received pieties of the day.

Mom & Apple Pie

Lots of buzz about a speech potential GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie gave at the Reagan Library last night.  Most of the chatter focuses on the big guy's will-he-or-won't-he game, but the following little dig at the current administration is what really caught my eye:  the Times reports that he had this to say about the current leadership in Washington:

Unfortunately, through our own domestic political conduct of late, we have failed to live up to our own tradition of exceptionalism.

First of all, doesn't the '-ism' suffix suggest that Christie is referring to a tradition of thinking in a certain way about something?  But this is misleading; although he seems to be referring to that lame GOP trope according to which Barack Obama doesn't pay enough obeisance to the idea that America is an exceptional country, one somehow not subject to the same moral and geopolitical constraints and expectations that people in other times and places are subject to (in other words, a way of thinking), my take is that he explicitly wants to say that we're currently falling below our own high standards of, er, exceptional-ness.

Governor Christie is entitled to his own opinion regarding how exceptional we're currently being.  But as for the doctrine of exceptionalism, that's just crazy talk.  The idea implied, namely, that we can and ought to play by our own set of rules, strikes me as little more than a license for imperialism.  And that's to say nothing of the epistemological hubris:  would I claim to have the best parents on earth?  No:  they're really the only parents I've ever had--how would I know what kind of parenting is available out there in the great, wide world?  Does that mean I can't love my parents?  Of course not:  there are many reasons to love my parents.  Similarly, I can love my country without claiming that it's the greatest country on earth, and it would be foolish of me, based on my biased experience, to make such a claim in the first place.

Citizens, Disguised

The Times reports on the new realities of our campaign-financing sham:

While most of the candidates are backed by one or more superPACs — nominally independent groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on their behalf — Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry’s supporters have assembled what appear to be the most robust groups, staffed by former aides with longstanding ties to the formal campaigns and financed by the candidates’ leading donors.

The groups essentially function as auxiliary units of the campaigns, even though they are required by federal law not to coordinate their activities or messages. Mr. Romney is backed by Restore Our Future, a group founded this year by three veterans of his 2008 campaign for president. Recently, the chief fund-raiser for Mr. Romney’s campaign jumped to Restore Our Future, and he has already met with some of Mr. Romney’s major donors and supporters — a practice permitted by current campaign regulations

Mr. Perry is backed by Make Us Great Again, a group advised by a prominent Austin lobbyist who is his former chief of staff and financed by some of his leading donors...

Grading Obama

Bill Keller provides a thoughtful appraisal of Obama's tenure thus far in today's New York Times.  On the one hand, as he acknowledges, critics on the left can rightfully complain about 'Obama’s deal to continue the Bush tax cuts, his surrender of a public option on health care, his refusal to call the Republicans’ bluff on the debt ceiling rather than swallow budget cuts', etc.  But regardless of his shortcomings, we need to keep in mind some considerable achievements; to the hyperbolator who claims that Obama hasn't done a goddamn thing, Keller replies that 'Obama pulled the country back from the brink of depression; signed a health care reform law that expands coverage, preserves choice and creates a mechanism for controlling costs; engineered a fairly stringent financial regulatory reform; and authorized the risky mission that got Osama bin Laden'.

Berlin: Capital of Bohemia, or Global 'Pitstop'?

New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman recently published a thoughtful piece comparing SoHo in its artistic heyday to contemporary Berlin. On the other hand, and not to put too fine a point on it, Kimmelman compares 1970s SoHo--one neighborhood within the Big Apple--to contemporary Berlin. So it's not surprising that he is 'struck' by 'one obvious difference' between the two scenes:

SoHo then was a genuine community, a world within the art world, nested inside the larger world of the city. Berlin, for all its glories and advantages, has become, in terms of art, a pit stop on the global caravan. For better and worse, its cultural circles are in large part made up of transients who don’t necessarily speak the language and who live on top of the city. They’re there for the cheap rents, studio space, parties and one another.

Without denying that Kimmelman has a very good point, it nevertheless seems to me that there's a real lack of precision here. Why not compare 'SoHo then' to one of Berlin's arts clusters in, say, Friedrichshain, or Mitte, or Kreuzberg--especially when the differences between Berlin's different scenes can be rather intense? So what if there isn't a 'genuine community' that unites all of Berlin's art world? It's much more likely that one would find such community at the level of the neighborhood, or Kiez.

You're Never Too Old to Scuba Dive

A fascinating look at the unlikely suburban roots of Animal Collective's mysticism:

“Magic and childhood and music-making are three things that just have a way of coming together, at least for us,” Portner says. “The idea of magic to me is similar to how a child relates to the world, and what a child is capable of, using its imagination. I think anyone is capable of it, all through their life, mostly they just forget how to do it.”

“The first thing we did this morning was take a walk through the woods to where the salamanders are,” Weitz says, gesturing to a cluster of trees behind the tennis court.

“I think it’s a shame because I don’t think most people do it consciously,” Portner says. “They let the repetition of their daily lives get in the way.”

“Josh and I both like to scuba dive,” Weitz says. “It doesn’t matter what age you are. You see people who are 60 years old who still look so excited when they’re scuba diving.”

Anti-'Racism'

The reaction over at Sociological Images to the above cartoon is a classic example of how loose and mindless definitions of racism have become in this country. It seems clear to me at least that the humor here has to do with the moral misshapenness of white supremacists in love; as Sociological Images (or at least as the author of the post, anyway) sees it, lynching is no laughing matter, and the mere mention of it is itself tantamount to an act of racism. Even worse, the explanation on the part of the student newspaper that published the cartoon--'Its intent was to ask how can someone show affection for one person while at the same time hating someone else enough to commit such a heinous act as hanging'--is rejected in the following manner:

[The Echo] explains that the intention was to point out the “hypocrisy of hate-filled people,” not make light of lynching, without interrogating the relative importance of intent and reception. One could argue that cultural producers are at least somewhat responsible for the myriad of ways that an item could be reasonably interpreted.

This is a bit of a cop-out ('One could argue that...'). But let's say that the author actually committed to this argument instead of straddling the fence. The author is then using a line of reasoning familiar to oppressively censorious regimes, but not, one would have thought, characteristic of thoughtful, left-leaning sociological criticism. Why tolerate complexity, ambiguity, or doubles-entendres? We should hold cultural producers responsible for any reasonable interpretation of their texts, even if they might be demonstrably far from the intended meaning.

Trading Places

Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It's entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell (the author of the quote above) acknowledges the manner in which Obama-watchers oscillated between judgments of 'not black enough' to 'too black' during the 2008 campaign, but offers this little thought experiment as a way of illustrating her main claim: that Obama not only disrupted standard definitions of blackness, but put whiteness itself in crisis.

Suddenly whiteness was no longer about educational achievement, family stability or the command of spoken English. One might argue that the folksy interventions of Sarah Palin were a desperate attempt to reclaim and redefine whiteness as a gun-toting ordinariness that eschews traditional and elite markers of achievement.

Obama's whiteness in this sense is frightening and strange for those invested in believing that racial categories are stable, meaningful and essential. Those who yearn for a postracial America hoped Obama had transcended blackness, but the real threat he poses to the American racial order is that he disrupts whiteness, because whiteness has been the identity that defines citizenship, access to privilege and the power to define national history.

Who are these threatened upholders of America's racial order, and what evidence is there of their efforts to contain this disruption? Harris-Lacewell doesn't say--nevertheless, an interesting read.

Year One

I love Gail Collins. She's so witty, though, that I wonder if she isn't misunderestimated as a political analyst. You might be too busy laughing to notice that she's got quite an intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of Beltway culture (what Emily Nussbaum calls 'a needling insight into the surreal grind of governance'), as well as a familiarity with key political figures that goes back decades. Anyhoo, GailCo is on my mind because one of her recent columns delivers as sympathetic and pragmatic a capsule assessment of Obama's first year as is possible at present (any more sympathetic, and the author would have to be a White House staffer; any more pragmatic, and the defense would boil down to 'Well, at least he's not Bush!'). Here is what she says:

I personally think Obama has been doing a good job, all things considered. The economy is still depressing, but that’s an improvement over mind-bendingly terrifying. The rest of the world likes us better, and whenever the president goes overseas he seems to be able to nudge the other countries toward a little progress on some issue on which they had been hopelessly stuck.

And health care reform. Extremely big deal. Really could pass. Eventually.

No matter how difficult the issue, Obama has been sensible, deliberative. Just look at Dick Cheney swooping around like a dementor from Harry Potter, and you have to appreciate how much things have improved.

There you have it.

Brain Candy

It's the little things in life, as they say in Brain Candy. Here's one of my favorites: crossing the Williamsburg Bridge on the J Train, eating my own homecooked stir-fry leftovers as the lights of Manhattan slowly pass in review.